US Dollar Dominance? Iran and Iraq aim to DESTROY it

Tehran and Baghdad have decided not to use the US dollar in bilateral trade transactions, the Mehr news agency reported.

The US currency “has been deleted” from the list of currencies used in business transactions between Iraq and Iran, said the president of the Iran-Iraq Chamber of Commerce, Yahya Ale Eshaq, commenting on the trade relations between the two countries after the restoration of US sanctions against Iran.

According to Eshaq, in the financial agreements the American currency will be replaced by the Euro, Iraqi dinar and Iranian rial.

The trade between the two countries reaches eight billion dollars annually.

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It is not the first time that several countries decided to abandon the dollar in trade with each other. For example, China buys oil from Angola, gas from Russia and coal from Mongolia in yuan. Russia, for its part, has expressed its desire to make payments in national currencies with Turkey, while the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) plan to create a trading system without the participation of the US dollar.

The US sanctions policy may cause other countries to create an alternative financial system, which in turn will lead to the end of the global hegemony of the dollar, said the director of the Institute for Global Security Analysis in his article for the CNBC.

According to the analyst , following the active introduction of sanctions and trade restrictions, the US is in economic war with one in ten countries in the world, including Russia, Iran, Venezuela, China, North Korea and others. The population of these countries exceeds two billion people and their total GDP is more than 15 trillion dollars.

To resist Washington pressure, governments and businessmen in those countries have joined forces to create an alternative financial system to that led by the dollar. If this plan comes true, US dominance on the global financial stage will be challenged.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies. He has an MA in International Relations and is interested in Great Power Rivalry as well as the International Relations and Political Economy of the Middle East and Latin America.